My one disappointment with Star Trek: Into Darkness

(I just realized that it’s been a full year since I last posted, and that was also a feministy movie rant. This tells me that [a] I should blog more and [b] I like feministy movie rants)

(Also I avoided major plot points but there might be a couple mild spoilers in here)

I’m pretty sure I can claim ownership of a geek card. I love Batman so much that I saw The Dark Knight three times in the theater, and The Dark Knight Rises twice. I even love Batman Forever. That’s dedication. I have seen the complete Star Wars series more times than I can count and could hum pretty much any song from the soundtrack verbatim. I grew up on the Amazing Spiderman cartoon. I read about brains and history for fun. So yeah, kinda geeky.

So, true to my geek form, I have now seen Star Trek: Into Darkness twice within the span of a month. And yes, I loved the movie. While my familiarity with the Star Trek franchise is slightly less than my familiarity with Star Wars (I think comparing the two is unfair and silly, but that’s a rant for another day), I still love it. I grew up on Wrath of Khan and the Trouble with Tribbles (which still weirds me out to this day). When the 2009 reboot was released, my entire family and I went to the midnight premiere. So yes, I love Star Trek.

And what’s not to love? There are so many advantages to being a futuristic, sci-fi natured series: rad technological advances, easy access to metaphors about politics and social justice, ability to show many cultures and races (even imaginary or otherworldly ones).

                                                       And also Benedict Cumberbatch.

And when it comes to women, Star Trek tends to commit less of the media representation sins.  A good portion of the crew on the Enterprise are women, in fact I’d say a good half, at least in the newer incarnations.

And let’s not forget Uhura. For the most part, her badass strong lady characteristics have remained intact. She successfully runs her own station on the ship and is a vital part of the crew. In Into Darkness specifically, she faces a group of big, burly Klingons all by herself. She uses her awesome language skills to communicate with them in a crisis situation. It was legit. When there are so few strong female characters to identify with, it’s refreshing to see one like Uhura representing women as capable, strong, and intelligent.

It is because of all of these things that my one disappointment with Into Darkness was so disappointing. In this episode, a new lady character was introduced: Dr. Carol Wallace (played by Alice Eve), a science officer and advanced weapons specialist. “Cool!” I thought. “A lady character who might actually be recognized for her brains and not just her body!”

Nope. Didn’t happen.

For being introduced as a super-intelligent weapons specialist, she isn’t represented as one very well. Dr. Wallace is shown as being useful twice. Twice. In a 132-minute movie.  In which she’s supposed to be a WEAPONS SPECIALIST. She spends the rest of the time being a completely vapid and borderline useless character. This was enough to give me an ounce or two of disappointment, but I went to full-blown facepalm mode when she was featured in a 100% gratuitous underwear scene.

She literally changes clothes in the back of a bunker for no good reason, in front of Captain Kirk, no less. She asks him not to look. He looks, and so does the camera, giving us a full body shot of her in her underthings. She gives him a mildly annoyed shrug, and the scene cuts. URRGGHHH WAS THIS EVEN NECESSARY?

                       This scene literally had more to do with the plot of its respective movie.

It made me so mad. Like, literally mad. Not “oh that was mildly annoying” but legitimately pissed. Here is a series that I love, that is usually pretty cool about diverse representation, and it had one of the most flat-out gratuitous, unnecessary and objectifying scenes I’d ever witnessed. I would ask why, but I know why. We live in a culture in which women are often valued for their bodies, not for their personalities or their intelligence or their kindness or their abilities or any of the countless other things that humans are valued for.

It’s already a pretty well-known fact that women have low representation in the movies anyway (I’ll cite a great example article at the end that talks about this). Male characters dominate the screen, and women are usually thrown in as a love interest who only serves to supplement the male character or just as a pretty face (or body). This is something I am clearly not happy about, and something that should concern you, too.

In my last post, I commented on the effect of the media on our kids’ minds. Well, guess what…it affects ours, too. There’s this rad thing called “cultivation theory” that basically means this: what we see in the media affects how we view the real world. A prime example of this, called the “CSI effect,” is that people who watch more crime shows are likely to predict that local crime rates are actually way higher than they really are. These happen with representations of gender, too: the more we see women being represented as nothing more than a body, the more we start to believe that to be true.

The makers of the film did acknowledge that this may have been a bit misogynistic, as evidenced in this tweet and in a few other public statements. (Lindelof was a producer and writer for Into Darkness)



They even decided to release a clip of a shower scene involving Benedict Cumberbatch’s character. This was, I’m guessing, supposed to be a show of good faith (and likely a dose of serious excitement for fangirls everywhere—yes, including me). But, the fact of the matter is, this scene wasn’t included in the actual film (despite the fact that it may have had more of a connection to the plot), but the Alice Eve scene was (despite its complete lack of connection to the plot). Seems just a tad sexist to me.

Sorry, I had to. It was just too appropriate.

Now, am I going to boycott it? No. Like I said, other than this, I really liked it. Media will never be perfect, but it is always a good idea to be conscious and critical consumers. We should always be paying attention, always asking questions, always having conversations. Were those few minutes of the film really frustrating? Yeah. Can we still use it as a way to have awesome socially conscious feminist dialogue? Of course. I wouldn't have it any other way.
(Just so all of you know, on my first try I had this almost completely finished and accidentally erased ALL OF IT. I completely re-wrote it. Dedication, folks. DEDICATION.)


*Article about lack of female characters:

http://flavorwire.com/391410/guess-what-hollywoods-bridesmaids-revolution-never-happened